I’ve worked for places that had policies on what types of events we could and could not attend even on personal time. If it’s a work related event, even if you go in a personal capacity, it can affect your employers rep.
I know of at least one studio that isn’t sending anyone but the top brass to GDC because they’re afraid of losing people.
Of course, they have reason to the way they run their studio.
Greetings:
Hey, thanks for the love. There’s some more good stuff still under wraps, so we hope to keep this momentum going.
As for GDC policy, I know for a fact that we’re paying for a lot of people from the studios to go this year, and we did last year as well. That rumor may have been from a particularly dysfunctional studio, false, or under previous management. At the present, we’re doing all kinds of progressive things, like getting folks from different studios together to share solutions/tech/best practices and the like.
<pimp>
And if you haven’t seen the stuff on Band Mashups (yes, I know, the name is terrible), take a look. It’s one of the projects I kept wanting to bring up every time people had the “publishers hate risk” or “costs are killing creativity” arguments, but I couldn’t say anything because it wasn’t announced. There’s something viscerally gleeful about mariachi guys throwing bombs around to “Insane in the Membrane”.
</pimp>
Best,
Michael.